Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe

[63] some of keeping it (Thanksgiving), but perhaps we should all have felt something of the text, “How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?” Your praises of Aunt Esther I read twice in an audible voice, as the children made some noise the first time. I think I detected a visible blush, though she found at that time a great deal to do in spreading bread and butter for James, and shuffling his plate; and, indeed, it was rather a vehement attack on her humility, since it gave her at least “angelic perfection,” if not “Adamic” (to use Methodist technics). Jamie began his Sundayschool career yesterday. The superintendent asked him how old he was. “I'm four years old now, and when it snows very hard I shall be five,” he answered. I have just been trying to make him interpret his meaning; but he says, “Oh, I said so because I could not think of anything else to say.” By the by, Mary, speaking of the temptations of cities, I have much solicitude on Jamie's account lest he should form improper intimacies, for yesterday or day before we saw him parading by the house with his arm over the neck of a great hog, apparently on the most amicable terms possible; and the other day he actually got upon the back of one, and rode some distance. So much for allowing these animals to promenade the streets, a particular in which Mrs. Cincinnati has imitated the domestic arrangements of some of her elder sisters, and a very disgusting one it is.

Our family physician is one Dr. Drake, a man of a good deal of science, theory, and reputed skill, but a sort of general mark for the opposition of all the medical cloth of the city. He is a tall, rectangular, perpendicular